How & Why Performance Marketers Must Get Brand Marketing Traction For Q4

Instead of knuckling down, it’s time to look up – up the funnel to brand campaigns.

Yes, it’s counterintuitive to get further from the point of conversion while purchase intent is highest. In this article, I’ll explain why it’s a good idea – and how to take steps to get there.

Why brand campaigns are a smart move in Q4

Not only are CPCs and CPMs more expensive than ever, particularly in Q4, nearly every brand who comes to my agency for support is overspending at the bottom of the funnel. If you haven’t done analyses for marginal return or incrementality, I can almost guarantee you’re spending on campaigns that produce less of a return than you think.

Campaigns built to capture high levels of intent – think retargeting campaigns and brand search campaigns – aren’t just piggybacking on the demand generated up the funnel, they’re often spending budget to record events and conversions that would have happened anyway. If you do the work to identify where that’s happening, you can pull money from those campaigns without much of an impact on revenue – and find yourself some resources to reallocate on initiatives like reach to bring new users into the funnel at lower engagement costs.

Speaking of lower engagement costs, we’ve seen some startling numbers, even recently. One client’s upper-funnel Meta campaign last month recorded a CPM of $.07, which means they were paying virtually nothing to introduce their brand and products to a huge new swath of users.

How to get traction

Of course, moving up the funnel isn’t a next-day initiative once you’ve made the decision. To get started properly, I recommend the following:

1. Examine your data and reporting

In a worst-case scenario, you’re still relying on last-click attribution and reporting from the platforms themselves. This will leave you vulnerable to poor incrementality and to each platform over-crediting itself for your conversions.

If this is your situation, start by picking a more nuanced, platform-agnostic model of attribution that accounts for more touchpoints. And it should go without saying that your CRM data needs to be clean to get a full picture of things like pipeline impact and CLTV (customer lifetime value), so spend some time on QA there as well.

2. Run holdout (or lift) tests

Once your data and reporting is in relatively good shape, it’s time to run a lift test (also known as a holdout test) to assess incrementality. There are some caveats to keep in mind here: the test needs to be structured well to produce accurate results, and you may not want to risk going dark in high-volume geos or demographics when purchase intent is highest.

The good news, though, is that you can stand one of these up fairly easily; Google and Meta offer lift test functionality that you can tap into. Whether you’re working with an agency or directly with a platform rep, you can definitely get something underway in short order once you’ve decided on your parameters (big enough to be conclusive but not so big you might tank your overall volume).

3. Build a creative repository

Expanding your reach means you’ll have to expand your creative. When you build out your creative for upper-funnel campaigns, make sure you’re covering a range of themes, appeals, pain points, and benefits, which will give you a much more powerful understanding of what resonates with your users than creating a lot of visual iterations of the same message.

4. Reallocate your budget into channel tests

Assuming your holdout tests showed where you can cut some budget with minimal effect, you’ve got some budget to play with. There are two main options here: test net-new channels, which may be a bit of a tougher road to hoe in Q4, or test different campaign types within active channels.

If you’re trying to find new pockets of younger users, TikTok is a great play, especially with their new search ads option. (Unlike Google, TikTok search is more of a blend of discovery and intent than straight-up intent, so it covers more of the funnel.)

If you’re running Meta campaigns with DR objectives, consider a combination of objectives that can help you reach more users. We recently helped a B2C client move from conversion-only objectives to a combination of conversion and reach objectives and got big gains in both scale and efficiency – reach increased 82%, landing page clicks increased 51%, and CPA dropped 20%, without any extra budget added.

Taking the steps above comes with a huge bonus: unlike with DR campaigns, where results are relatively ephemeral, your efforts in moving up the funnel will help set the stage for a huge 2025. Any new audiences you’ve engaged now will cost less to convert later, and building the muscles to identify smarter budget allocation will make you a stronger marketer for the long term.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

Click the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friends.
The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.